Flexible Work and Commuter Delays: Motion [Private Members] Dail Éireann — 2026-01-21 ============================================================ Mark Wall (LAB), Kildare South I am glad the Minister of State is here today because he will know this is not the first time I have raised issues around the car parks that are the M7 and N7. I have been speaking about this for a number of years and An Cathaoirleach Gníomhach will know that. We have had a number of conversations on this and what we can do to solve the problem. This morning, I left my home at 6.30 a.m. and I walked through the doors at 10.05 a.m., having had to take a small phone call on the way. I am among thousands of commuters this morning who were stuck on the M7-N7 and, by extension, the M50 because of an accident on the M50. Recently, I spoke to TII about the number of accidents on these roads. I want to put on the record that, in the three years before this morning, there had been 2,100 accidents on the M50 alone. Recently, TII officials held up their hands and said there was nothing they could do about it, yet commuters are locked into their cars this morning. What is really worrying is many of those commuters have been late - they have contacted me in the car while I was on my way in - for appointments, including very important appointments in hospitals. I want to take a point made by my colleague Deputy Kelly about remote work. A lot of the people who have contacted us over the last number of weeks are working for the State. Over the last number of weeks, they have been told by various and many Departments that they must come back into work again - from two days to three and from three days to four - yet they will say that they can work from home and have been doing so for a long time. What we need, and as outlined in this motion, is something that the Government does not seem to recognise: the right of workers to flexible work. We need the Government to recognise that it needs to lead on the right to flexible work and show leadership by talking to the various Secretaries General and allowing those workers to work from home remotely. Those workers do an outstanding job as we all know. I am sure the Minister of State and his Government will agree with that. In the short time that I have left, I wish to raise a couple of issues. We have proposed a number of options for the short term. I know the Minister of State will come back to me and talk about investment and multimillion euro investment. That is something that we in the Labour Party welcome but the problem, as the Minister of State and I both know, is that these will take three, four, five, six or seven years. I will give an example of a project. The M4 bus corridor project has been going on for seven years. My colleague Councillor Angela Feeney informs me that the project has been ready to go for a number of months. It could have made a difference. The problem is that the legislation to allow the hard shoulder to be used as a bus lane has never been completed. The construction has been done but only after the construction was done did the Government decide we needed legislation to allow it to be used. That is what is going on. From conversations I have had with members of the Government, I know we all recognise what is going on in this. We saw what happened during Covid when people were working from home. Productivity went up and everybody had a quality of life that so many of our workers in this country deserve. This is really a workers’ rights issue - there can be no doubt. Over the years, the Minister of State and I have spoken about what we can do. What we in the Labour Party seek is for the Government to recognise that this is an emergency; this is chaos at the moment. People’s quality of life is being affected and so is their productivity, day in, day out. The Government needs to work with employers and agencies to ensure a right to flexible work. More importantly, we are calling for the Government to look at intermediate and short-term measures to try to solve the problems for so many commuters. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-21/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-31T01:00:51+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-01-21